PC Therapy?

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A concept came up in discussion a couple of weeks ago about how to resolve inter-party issues. We’re not going to try it ourselves, but I wanted to write about it a bit to share it and ponder the idea a bit.

It’s simple really…

For each other character in the group, a player will write down in a few sentences what their character thinks of them. So if you have four PCs in a group, character A will write about B, C, and D. Character B will write about A, C, and D, and so on.

And if you really want to make things interesting, you can also ask for feedback on what the players think about their character and the others in the group.

The GM would then gather these little summaries and… then what?

That’s really where the idea stopped. What would the GM do with these little snippets of information? Would they distribute them to the players after sanitizing the text a bit to protect the players? Perhaps come up with the top 3-5 things for each character and distribute that?

But how does that information help the player? Once a character is created, it’s tough to change their personality or how they behave towards other PCs or NPCs.

Would this technique be more useful to a group just starting out or a group of more experienced roleplayers?

I think in our case, this technique would be very interesting, but ultimately self destructive. I’m not sure any of us would be prepared for what might come to the surface.

This article has 2 comments

In the past I have usually done this type of thing just for my own sake as GM – to get a better idea of characters, and what they think of the other characters in a context that might not necessarily come out in the course of play. But I have been trying to obsess about the characters in my games not so much anymore, and let what comes out come out as a part of play.

@Brunomac – That’s definitely a concern of mine. I typically am a GM who likes to set the stage and let the PCs take over – but pre-built modules don’t always have that kind of flexibility. Ultimately the players and PCs must be happy with themselves and at least be accepting of the others in the group – and I worry that this sort of “therapy” would strain relationships further than they could recover from.